On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 6:30 AM, Yaron Koren yaron@wikiworks.com wrote:
I don't know whether this is WMF policy now, or a personal decision from Sumana, or a decision made by someone else, but in any case I don't understand it. It seems to me that there are two valid reasons for not simply allowing everyone to get a developer account: the first, and major, reason is to prevent malicious users from vandalizing or deleting code. The second is to prevent well-intentioned but incompetent developers from checking in buggy and/or badly-written code that requires lots of fixes and review time by the reviewers. In both cases, the person's presence in SVN would cause more harm than good.
I'm going to leave it to Sumana for the more complete reply here (she and I just spoke). Sumana inherited our existing process, and she's been running it about as well as it can be run. I think she's probably been uncomfortable breaking with tradition while she's relatively new and there's a lot of stakeholders, but I think we've got some room to break with tradition.
As it stands, we kinda backed into our current process. When I came on board, Tim had just moved over to OTRS. I spent some time with him understanding the process and figuring out how to speed things up, eventually pulling in other developers. Sumana took over the process at this point, which basically involves a handful of folks (Tim, Chad, and Aaron, I believe) quickly reviewing applications, and Sumana helping to dispatch responses. Since a lot of people are applying, there are quite a few to get through.
I think the process could benefit from some transparency on both sides of the equation. I know from talking to her Sumana would love to have a wider pool of developers to vet the list, and a more transparent process would make that easier. Those requesting access can help things by being more transparent, too. Developers who post to the mailing list and participate in IRC will have a lot easier time getting access (assuming they say sensible things in those venues). It's a lot less scary giving access to someone when you have enough information to speculate on what they're likely to do with it, and they've proven that they play well with others.
Since we don't have a process for reversing our decision (has anyone ever had their svn access revoked?), we're naturally going to be more conservative about who we let in.
Anyway, as Brion says, we're likely to change things around pretty substantially when we migrate to Git, anyway, so we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about what svn access looks like for everyone. I don't want to use that as an excuse to shut down any improvement, but merely want to remind people of why we aren't likely to do anything really radical in the short term.
Rob